I'm officially resigning from the haskell.org committee effective
immediately after the end of the Summer of Haskell.
To those of you on the committee, I apologize for abandoning you.
The reason I joined and have remained on the committee for the past several
years is entirely to deal with the needs of the Summer of Code, both
financially and administratively. It has provided me a way to give back to
a community that has been so incredibly good to me.
When Galois managed our finances, someone had to deal with it. When we
moved into SPI, it ironically started taking more effort. When we formed a
non-profit in December things started looking up in terms of administrative
overhead, but then we crushingly weren't accepted into the program this
year.
In the wake of that I was somehow able to raise funding and wrangle us
around $40,000 in sponsorship to fund eight students to work on Haskell for
the summer. The outpouring of goodwill there was tangible. Those projects
are wrapping up nicely now.
This part of my role within the committee has been as life affirming and
wonderful as anything I've ever done.
However, the job is coming at an ever greater personal cost that I'm simply
unwilling to continue to bear. My wife has come to dread the "there's
someone wrong on the internet" moments, and I've come to realize it isn't
fair to her -- I simply find myself spread too thin.
I shall continue to serve on the Core Libraries Committee, as I do continue
to care deeply about the structure of the language we all love, if not so
much the tooling around it, and I am willing to put in the time to on that
front where I feel much more strongly about the issues at hand and have
what I hope is a nuanced opinion to offer. Ultimately, the barbs thrown
around, say, during the Foldable/Traversable Proposal, while heated, never
felt personal, merely rational disagreement between well meaning parties
with different priorities.
I care a great deal about our community; it was ultimately Cale and the
rest of the folks in #haskell channel that lured me in at first, not any of
the technical merits of the language. Those only took hold of me later on,
but without that comfortable environment never would have had a chance to
set.
I do not care enough about the contents of a web page to let my health,
relationships, productivity and home life suffer further. I hope that by
stepping back I can continue to retain or perhaps regain some of those
friendships that recent events have strained.
--Edward Kmett
